The Nutcracker came into being as a purely functional object. Golden painted nuts are a tradition of Christmas in Germany and of course, if you wanted to eat the kernel......you first had to crack the nut.Nutcrackers soon became decorative objects representing various characters, and of course, none more important than the King. The first Seiffen nutcrackers were thought to have been made in the 1870's in a small workshop run by Wilhelm Fuchtner. The basic design has remained the same to this day.